Archive for April, 2017

This year, there were about twenty people I know who were entered for the London Marathon. Sorry, I could only afford to sponsor one of you. My social media timelines were full of the excited chatter of people getting ready for the event. For several, it was their first full marathon. For others, it was their first London for a while. For a few, it was their second marathon within a very short space of time. And was I jealous? No, not a bit.

It’s amazing how, nowadays, if you tell people that you run for sport, their immediate reaction seems to be that you must be a marathon runner, or an aspirant marathon runner. I’ve noticed that this is becoming more and more the case. There will be two reasons for this: 1) the resurgence once more of interest in distance running, and 2) the automatic assumption that anyone as old as I must look simply won’t be capable of racing short distances on a track.

Just occasionally, it leaves me feeling like a second-class citizen in some of the environments I mix within. This is sometimes amplified by people, who, having established, for example, that I’ve been to a track meeting and raced in a full-on 100 metres and a 200 metres race, then say to me something like “What, you mean you were there all that time, and didn’t even race the equivalent of one lap of the track?”

However, as this blog has been describing in the last couple of months, I’ve not even been running that far lately!

My damaged shoulder is responding very nicely to the rehab regime prescribed for it. I’d say I was well into Stage 3 of the process, and the start of Stage 4 looms. I have the intended “full, pain-free range of movement under modest load” after weeks of specific (and largely isometric) exercises. An interesting discovery, however, was that there was an important word completely missing from my rehab description.

That word was “stability”. I found several times in the last month or so that, just as I was tempted to give myself a metaphorical pat on the back for progress made, I was let down by realising or discovering that although I had pain-free movement and some restored strength in the joint, the shoulder remained unstable, and would easily fail me under load. Therefore, a certain amount of the progress was actually a bit illusory.

The answer was simple. By prolonging the duration of some of the routines I’ve been doing – by doing them more slowly – I found I was getting an almost exponential gain in stability from them. The name of the game at this point really isn’t to establish any kind of fast or explosive movement, after all. Strength is one thing, but in a joint as complex as a shoulder, if that strength is only capable of sustaining movement in one or two planes, the job is far from complete. A key factor of my mobilisation work was to establish 360 degree movement. Moving on from that to (as near as damnit) 360 degree stability alongside that movement is actually proving reasonably easy to achieve, but boy am I glad I’m being self-analytical about all of this stuff, because it nearly got overlooked!

A tougher nut to crack has been the insertion-point achilles tendinopathy which my enthusiasm to get some aerobic training under my belt laid me wide open to, about six weeks ago. For starters, the whole of my left heel at the achilles insertion point remained acutely sensitive to touch, and to pressure from normal running shoes. There was, however, no inflammation visible, and ice and anti-inflammatories had no effect whatsoever.

I mentioned “stress tolerance” in my previous blog. This was a concept to which I was introduced by my chiro once we were sure we’d got the right diagnosis, and a broadly helpful remedial regime lined up. In some quarters, so I’ve read, “stress tolerance” is seen as just a fancy name for a “grin and bear it” approach to recovery. For some injuries, that is, of course, the very last thing you should be doing. However, bells began to ring from my distant past (well, ok, 30 years ago) when I was recovering from pretty serious back damage. My osteopath at that time was of the school who believed that “backs need to be put to work”. So, it seems, do achilles tendons trying to recover from insertion point damage.

Softly, softly is the name of the game, of course. For a couple of my gym sessions a week, I reverted to wearing my Vibram Five Fingers shoes, in an effort to mobilise the whole of my foot. Had I got stronger or less sensitive, feet, I’d possibly have gone barefoot, although the gym discourages that. Initially my limit without aggravation was about one kilometre walking on a dead flat treadmill. At the point at which repeating that for a few sessions simply became tedious, I began a few jogging strides, working up to about four or five hundred metres in total. The art was to know to stop before any pain began, which was a bit like Russian Roulette.

And so it was for every session for a couple of weeks. And gradually normality is beginning to return. Today, I managed 30 minutes pain free, slow jogging on the treadmill, reaching the heady heights of around 4 kilometres. At this rate, I’ll be back tackling Parkrun again soon!